MacKinnon: Tour of Alberta switches to lower-priced TV production company

John MacKinnon, Edmonton Journal08.20.2015

Cyclists head down a steep hill entering a sharp corner during a rural stage of the Tour of Alberta race on Sept. 5, 2014.Ed Kaiser
/ Edmonton Journal

Duane Vienneau, CEO of the Tour of Alberta, says the not-for-profit entity couldn’t afford to have Aquila Productions and Broadcast Services International handle the production of the TV broadcast again for this year’s six-stage cycling race Sept. 2-7, 2015.Ed Kaiser
/ Edmonton Journal

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EDMONTON - The Tour of Alberta, a video postcard of the province as much as it’s a sports event, has switched TV production companies just two weeks before the six-stage cycling race gets rolling in Grande Prairie on Sept. 2.

Tour organizers and a partnership comprised of Aquila Productions, led by Don Metz, and Broadcast Services International (BSI), which produced the TV broadcast in the Tour’s first two years, failed to agree on the cost of delivering a world-class broadcast this time out. So their arrangement was terminated Tuesday.

Instead, Tour of Alberta CEO Duane Vienneau said a U.S.-based consortium assembled by Medallist Sports LLC, the Tour’s technical partner, will produce the broadcast that is transmitted to a worldwide TV audience by International Management Group (IMG).

“Nothing against Don Metz and BSI, we were very happy with their services,” Vienneau said . “We just didn’t come to a financial arrangement that made sense for us, so we are looking at another company to come in and do our broadcast.

“Everything else is still the same. IMG is still doing our international distribution and we’ll still be on Sportsnet (in Canada). The general public wouldn’t know any different. It’s just our production team that has been changed.”

Metz said Aquila and BSI could not guarantee the quality of the broadcast at the contractual price point on offer from the Tour of Alberta.

“We feel that unless we are able to use the same facilities that we were able to use last year, which gave us an award-winning broadcast that went to 52-plus million people in 107 countries, we don’t want to risk our reputation and crew members,” Metz said. “We feel it’s the best for us to step back.”

In the Tour’s first season in 2013, technical glitches involving uplinking TV signals from the ground to aircraft and back to a TV compound caused transmission interruptions.

Those problems were resolved in 2014, but Metz believes cost-cutting measures could jeopardize the broadcast quality this year. Vienneau acknowledged the Tour must operate within a finite budget and Aquila/BSI fell victim to that.

“We have been guaranteed a ceiling price which is substantially lower than where we ended up with (Aquila and BSI),” Vienneau said. “At the end of the day, we are a not-for-profit (entity). Our governmental funding is always diminishing and our corporate funding is always increasing.

“It is a fluid process. The ultimate goal is we want the Tour of Alberta to live forever. But just like managing your own household, we can’t overspend.”

So Medallist Sports LLC, a sports event management company based in Peachtree City, Ga., will bring the same TV production crew currently handling the broadcast of the USA Pro Cycling Challenge in Colorado to Alberta. The consortium also handled broadcast of the Amgen Tour of California and the Tour of Utah.

Jim Birrill, managing partner for Medallist Sports, said the TV consortium will try to recruit many of the same freelance camera operators, field producers and technical staff required to mount a broadcast. All told, he said, the production staff is about 45-50 people.

As the Tour’s technical parter, Birrell said he and his staff already have detailed knowledge of the routes, as well as working relationships with the organizing committees in each city and so forth.

“I’ve been doing this for 35 years and I’m not overly concerned,” Birrell said. “I know we’ve got strong engineers that are fully capable of working on the fly, if necessary.”

Vienneau also believes the change in production companies won’t hurt the TV show.

“If we thought it was going to (adversely) affect the transmission, we would never have made the move,” Vienneau said.

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MacKinnon: Tour of Alberta switches to lower-priced TV production company

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